


Blown

by HardlyFair



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Friends to Lovers, Hurt/Comfort, Love Confessions, M/M, Nothing was real, One Shot, Romance, Sherlock (TV) Season/Series 04 Fix-it, TFP was a dream, The Final Problem, Where did the TD12 go?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-22
Updated: 2018-05-22
Packaged: 2019-05-10 01:39:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14727548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HardlyFair/pseuds/HardlyFair
Summary: When he’s shot through the lung, John dreams.





	Blown

JUST A MAGIC TRICK.

-/-

John didn't matter.  
  
_“Vatican Cameos.”_

  
_“In a minute.”_

  
_Crinkle of static, something brushing over the Bluetooth. It is tucked in a trouser pocket. John closes his eyes, his own fingers hovering over his own Bluetooth, still in his ear. He’ll keep it there in case Sherlock calls for him. He needs to hear_.

John didn't matter.

“ _Try as long as possible not to drown.”_

  
_Dismissed_.

John didn't matter.

“ _Don't prolong his agony; shoot him._

  
_“Shoot him!_

  
_“Nothing more than a distraction; a little scrap of ordinariness for you to impress, to dazzle with your cleverness. You’ll find another.”_

  
_John straightens in his spot, and Sherlock half turns away. Mycroft is unable to keep a chuckle of disbelief to himself._

Replaceable.

  
Even to the person he may have mattered to. His worst fears manifest themselves in each pocket of Sherrinfort. Each shadow holds a new creature made of prickling, crackling dread. Things lurk in the top corners of the metal rooms - they aren't malicious, and they don't do anything, but they watch him.

  
There is no glass - anyone can get to Sherlock. But he slipped his line to John away. John can't touch him. Sherlock is an island. Sherrinfort is an island.

  
It isn't real. Mycroft is real and has always been right, Sherlock will find another John Watson.

  
John is not creative, not brilliant as this man whom he loves. Sherlock's been on the phone with a distressed child before - over the fake painting. There has been an imagined dog in a time before. He can't come up with anything original. Recycled. It's all been done. _There is nothing new under the sun._

  
Sherlock's skin splits beneath his white knuckles like faults over tectonic plates. The island collapses. The scalpel flew across the room and the fault lines in Sherlock’s porcelain facade crack wider.

 

_”No one’s untouchable.”_

  
The gun had already been fired when she jumped. Why didn't I see it? John would never forgive her. Not for _touching him. Drugging. Shooting. Manipulating._ John asked Sherlock not to be dead, but he doesn't ask that of her.

  
The governor shot himself.

  
Three men dropped from a cliff, hanging out a broadside window and into the ocean - in another time, one of them would be destined to graze John. John did nothing.

  
Unable to do anything at all - right or wrong. Sherlock counted backwards from ten and John stood in place. He would never simply stand there.

  
But the soles of his shoes had been tacked to the flooring, and behind his sealed lips he had been begging. And the paint had been fresh in the room, new, to disguise another smell. Walls don't contract after you've painted them. Not real ones.

  
It isn't real.

  
_(“He saved my life, but he couldn't touch me. Why?”)_

  
_It was a nightmare._

  
All the images dissolve in black oil - the tables, the rifle on the wall (John had to show Sherlock how to use it - it was important), the lantern, the ocean and the grass - sinking down into the liquid until they've all been swallowed. He thinks he can see black teeth against white gums, shining fangs and pink baby bottles. Someone tells him he’ll go blind. A firing squad in pixelated camouflage all line up facing a backwards man against the bloodied brick.

  
A deafening crack of a gunshot, and he opens his eyes to bright light. The intensity makes him shut them again, willing away the outside sun. His head aches. His heart is heavy. His lungs are pulled down.

  
A scene before him.

  
John turns, the night is gone, the blanket from his shoulders disappears, there are no blinking blue and red lights from the police cars, and he is staring at a wide, shallow river. Never mind how he got here. Someone is breathing in his ear, it sounds like, but as he adjusts to the light, there is no one beside him.

  
It's a pale day outside. Clouds pass in the bleak sky, and on the horizon, John can see a wood filled with old trees.

  
A breeze soughs through the full branches and ripples the water and the edges hard and firm.

Across the river, a small, curly-haired boy with big cheeks plays with a dog in the shallows. Between John and them is fresh, clear water and low, crouching lengths of sand, with long strings of clumping grass and stones lining the banks. The dog, an iron spaniel, leaps and splashes river over the child’s rain boots.

  
John steps into the river, the stones turning beneath his shoes.

  
The water climbs his jeans through capillary action and wets his skin, raising gooseflesh. The dull sun beats down. There is no sister. No other boy but the dog. The water sends rings from his ankles across to the boy and the spaniel.

  
Alarmed at the sudden introduction of a stranger, the child looks at him, seeing with wide blue eyes, and as the child retreats from the wading edges, the water rises to John’s waist. John looks for his reflection, raising his arms to keep them from the reaches of the steadily clouding liquid.

  
In the stillness (say it like you mean it), Molly’s face flames up at him - but while the sky turns darker, clouds pregnant with bushed rain, the water shifts and twists black, and John sees Culverton’s deep-set eyes and malicious teeth staring back up at him.

  
That isn't him.

  
In disbelief he quickly raises his hands to his face, feeling the skin on his cheeks, which peels beneath the heavy press of the pads of his fingers.

  
A long paper strip pulls away, one side tan-weathered skin and the other covered with the words _blanched_ and _soldier_ over and over and over again.

  
What is _happening_?

  
John looks up, searching for answers, but the clouds in the sky say nothing. Where is the boy? Where is Sherlock?

  
Downstream, a tremendous crashing over the length of the river. Enormous amounts of water tumbling over itself like sea waves, like breakers beating at the shoreline.

  
The world tilts, and he's sucked under the flood.

  
Black - then,

  
Baker Street. He stares at Sherlock’s empty chair.

  
Two mugs, sitting together, one filled with coffee, and the other, tea. He reaches for the tea with an outstretched hand, but the ceramic glaze painted with ornate green carnations splinters with heavy weight of his longing.

  
The first day, John handed Sherlock his heart. He's yet to get it back. So many attempts to uncover Sherlock, to remove the dust from where it's settled over the lonely years. (“ _Answer your phone, I've been calling you_.”)

Burnt gunpowder. Blood. Asphyxiation. The carpet in his therapist's sitting room had been a terrible red against all the bleak whites.

  
‘ _If dog cannot swim,_

  
_neighbor is killer.’_

  
Here is the truth: he never left that room.

  
Tranquilizer guns don't smoke when fired. Medical doctors can discern child bones from a dog’s ( _he's useless, stupid, thinks himself so_ ). A thrown rope cannot cut hard iron chain. People don't talk to metaphors. John's not as perfect as Sherlock - and Sherlock is not that strong. John would always be bothered by the drugs; never indifferent.

  
If Sherlock was in danger, John would not be idle.

  
He would rather die.

  
He almost did. He never had such luck.

  
“ _Punctured a lung._ ”

  
Memories can be corrupted.

  
He sees through Sherlock’s mind, just for a moment, as those predestined to each other often do. The back of a cab, before John’s world fell to the pavement with blood streaking beautifully over his haunting face. Moriarty says, in the glitching screen, through his cat eyes and crinkly grin, “But that wasn't the final problem.”

  
Memories can be corrupted.

-/-

In a corner of the room in the hospital there were two carved elephant figurines, put there by a nurse who had both an obsession and an affinity with putting elephants in rooms. Her last job had been as an interior decorator. The elephants were facing each other on the shelf, and their trunks were touching.  
  
-/-

His fingers twitch for the first time in a week at half past three on a Wednesday afternoon. Sherlock is the one to see it. Feel it.

  
Each muscle is protesting movement and refuses singularly to cooperate. No moving. Recover.

  
John can process only the black behind his eyelids. In his chest, there's a dull, prolonged throbbing, and a more pronounced sting of a stitched incision somewhere under his left pectoral.

  
Just how many times is he going to escape death with a bullet inches from his heart? Hadn't she aimed for his skull?

  
His brow twitches involuntarily, jaw aching sorely at the hinges, enough for him to recognize, even vaguely, he must have had a tube down his throat for a significant amount of time. It isn't a dream anymore.

  
Able to crack his eyes open enough for them to burn with the bright light in the room, John catches sight of a dark head of hair. Then, nothing else. He goes back under.  
  
-/-

“...Wish you were answering me. You always ask me what's going on and,” the voice softens, “how I worked it out.”

  
John's fingers shift against canvas sheets, his mind emerging like a gently cresting whale to the sound of a sweet voice. It's all honeydew and bumblebees and lilac flowers. Maybe monkshood, instead. Sherlock would like to be something poisonous but beautiful. It's only realistic.

  
Then, “I thought you were going to die.”

-/-

“I'm afraid I said too much while we waited for the ambulance. Do you remember that you—” the voice breaks off. John recalls nothing.  

  
He can't imagine he sounded very comforting to whoever was helping him when he was shot.  

  
Still, he cannot move.

-/-  
  
“We must be meant to always find each other.”

  
The whisper comes through very close to John's right ear. It wakes him from a light doze, the near-haze he's been forced into by drugs for the last several hours.

  
Sherlock's voice is soft but intense. “I dreamt of you, on the plane.”

  
Mirrors, mirrors. John can't come up with anything new. Dog masquerading as childhood trauma. Child on the phone and a fake painting. Already his dream has begun to fade from his mind, and soon enough there won't be anything left of it. He's glad for it. There had been very disturbing themes within it. Sherlock will never be allowed to point a gun at himself, not ever.

  
“I thought,” he chokes, “we were in London again. Together. But it was another era, which I find preposterous. Although I did solve a cold case.”

  
Sherlock’s fingers slip over John’s. He can feel each ridge of his fingerprints, the solid, soft warmth that Sherlock exudes when wanting to be gentle. John makes an effort to squeeze or twitch his fingers, but his nerves don’t respond appropriately. A wave of concern washes over him like the black tide from his dream, worry over the drugs that had caused such a dream, but a nurse is heard clicking her heels and John slips back under again.

-/-

Sherlock's coat, John sees barely through his lashes, his heavy armor, lays carelessly half-across a chair, the collar touching the floor. He wears the face of a man who was presently losing the floor beneath his feet. And the shirt of one that had been up for many nights.

-/-

It’s naturally Sherlock by his side when he’s able to speak, from a throat that had been stuffed full of oxygen tubing and other work to close a lung.

  
His mouth forms Sherlock’s name, but no sound. The man sleeps, slumped over the lower half of John’s bed, exhausted and sad over his long arms like a pillow. “Sherlock,” he manages, but the word hurts.

  
Sherlock awakens immediately, sitting bolt upright and crowding very near to John’s face. “John, yes,” he answers, all traces of fatigue gone.

-/-

Tapping a rhythm over Sherlock's knuckles in morse, John smiles. His face feels greasy and caved with too many lines, it feels good, and he keeps tapping. “I dreamt of you, too. During all of this,” He glances around the room for a moment, and Sherlock half turns away to follow his gaze, apparently expecting John to be staring at one thing in particular.

  
Sherlock turns back, eyes all pretty. “Did you?” He asks, sounding vaguely surprised John had been listening.

  
“You had a sister.”

  
Sherlock tucks his chin against his neck and the rest of his chins make an appearance. “Mycroft is enough of a sister for me.”

  
John grins and breathes out because he can't really laugh, not yet. It's more like a tired wheeze than anything else. Sherlock glares at the square patch of the petroleum bandage, sealed on all but one side to let air out, but not be sucked in by the cavity in John's chest.

  
Sherlock tells him, “You're lucky.”

  
“Luck doesn't exist. It's all hard work, isn't it?”

  
Sherlock looks away. “You could've dreamt of aliens. Or flying rainbows. Why did you have to dream about my fake sister?”

  
“She was mad. Put me in a well. I dreamt you had a friend when you were a kid, too.” John doesn't quite know if rainbows count as flying normally, since they're already in the sky, but he's not going to point it out.

  
“I had friends.”

  
“Bull.”

  
Got you. Twitching mouth, mugged with a shadow of stubble. He never grew it very fast, much, or evenly.

  
John goes on, voice dragging over gravel, “I think I was supposed to be him. I wanted you to have friends - I wanted to be with you, even when you were a kid.” He stops. Breathes. Feels air move through his body. “Thought that maybe I could change it all, I guess?”

  
“Why would you change it?”

  
“I shouldn't have waited for so long.”

  
Sherlock is stricken. “Waited?”

  
“Well, I’m old, now. I was real handsome in my university days. Must've been all the sand.”

  
Sherlock's knees bounce up and down, both of them, like a child kicking out his legs. He's getting antsy and frustrated. Like always, it comes with squirming. “John, you're being cryptic. You are saying anything that means something, you're just saying words.”

  
In lieu of answering, John resumes his tapping.

  
Sherlock squirms again. “John. You're still very handsome.” This time, the wriggling movement in his seat was due to him being uncomfortable - not with the fact of what he was saying and having to reassure John that he was, in fact, very handsome, but the fact that he was being needled out into admitting that’s what he honestly saw and believed.

  
John smiles lethargically. How he loves this man. It's so, so easy. He was always meant to love Sherlock. God. He has never felt anything before this man. This tender-hearted man. “I’m very in need of a shower, is what I am.”

  
“But also handsome.”

  
“But also handsome,” John agrees, since Sherlock would never stop pestering him.

  
Sherlock looks at him, his undersea eyes mere grey in the sickening hospital lights. “Waited for what, John?”

  
John starts, and then he cannot stop confessing.

-/-

**Author's Note:**

> I hated it all.... props to TJLC for figuring out the problem with every single fuckin thing in the damn last episode


End file.
